New answers tagged productivity
0
Are you using a formal process? I'm guessing from the contextual clues and your other question that you are a) building software and b) in China. 'a' is relevant, 'b' may not be, but keep in mind I'm coming from a United States/Canada perspective and there may be cultural/learned behaviors that affect the viability of my suggestions or require adapting them. ...
2
There are other ways to increase productivity on bug fixes than just working longer. I would solicit ideas from your team about that and give them time to implement their ideas. Empowerment goes a long way toward morale. For some ideas:
Improve testing and get tests to run before every merge.
Refactoring of problematic code.
Prioritize your bugs so the ...
13
The way your employer treats people benefits nobody. They might get unpaid overtime from their staff but that is likely to result in poor morale, low quality work and a high turnover of staff (along with the cost/time required to train replacements).
In the long term, I think you need to push to change your employer's mindset. They are unlikely to ...
-9
How can I manage my members to maintain a reasonable productivity when my employer doesn't treat employees well?
The last half of the question is irrelevant. If employees are not being productive, discipline them since other approaches have not worked out. If you aren't prepared to discipline then you're failing in your role.
Take a guess at who is the ...
25
A wiser man than me said “You can make people stay in the office for 80 hours a week, but you can’t make them work more than 40 hours a week.”
That’s the problem you are running into, and there’s nothing you can do.
People come to the office because you pay them. They work because they want to. And you know why these people have no motivation to work.
1
Bad working conditions will take a toll on your employees - it doesn't matter who is to blame for them.
The best you can do is convince management that unpaid overtime is counter-productive and the rate of which they're pulling the 'occasional bit of overtime' as per what is likely in your employees' contracts might be illegal (jurisdiction dependant).
...
1
I'd suggest using time-management techniques to focus your productivity so that you don't feel too distracted by other things happening.
When I need to buckle down, I write myself a to-do list and work my way through that. I found that simply concentrating more lessens my tendency to be distracted by things.
I also find that the act of putting on ...
4
Good quality active noise-cancelling headphones (with or without music) and lightly tinted/filtered lenses (I find blue-filters greatly beneficial) in glasses (even if you don't require corrective lenses) are the best you are going to reasonably manage in an open-plan environment.
It's not a perfect solution by any means - but it helps significantly.
1
This may be a cultural thing. In some cultures “suggestions” are taken as orders and not following them would be highly confrontational. In other cultures, making suggestions shows you are interested, but you would ignore suggestions unless you think yourself they were a good idea.
The senior might not even realise that you follow suggestions against your ...
1
What do you mean by reveal? Are people asking you "how are you so fast?"?
Whatever you do, do NOT impose your productivity tricks on others because it will make people not want to work with you.
My personal productivity tricks involve using my keyboard to quickly navigate my OS and do mundane things like switch windows, close things, open other things, ...
2
IMHO, you will have to know your environment and play by ear. I have worked in places where there the atmosphere rewarded sharing ways to make work better and others that, well, didn't. A variation of the later group would be working with someone who will take your trick and then go to your boss and convince him about some "improvements" in a way that your ...
1
Say you have a task that takes 12 hours. You spend 20 hours developing automation that reduces this to 5 minutes of work and 4 hours of "monitoring". There is ROI to be considered. It may take 2 hours to train someone else in the use of it.
By all means share, but within a trusted circle, don't let a peer work without knowing about "global updates" for ...
2
What about working gradually? This is what I would do:
I start by sharing one or two tips/tricks to the rest of the team, and check their respnse: someone might say "Hey, that's a neat trick you teached me. Let me teach you something that you didn't know: ...". If you have colleagues like this, you continue sharing your tips/tricks. If, however, they don't ...
3
Share them when you have been promoted. Then your team will look good compared to other teams (of course, with time the knowledge will spread).
I don't agree with most other answers. You will get credit for sharing your tricks but it will be forgotten the next day.
-1
No, you should never reveal your productivity tricks to your peers. But you should reveal them, little by little, to your direct reports.
Your ability is a form of power. Before giving power away in an organisation, first make sure you can trade it with other power. Otherwise, you will just make your own position weaker in the organisation. It's algebra, ...
14
Kate Gregory gave an excellent answer, but I'd like to expand on it with an additional reason to share: the peer review process. Your tools might "automate some repetitive tasks and improve productivity significantly", but what if there is an error in those tools? What if there are good reasons to do something manually?
Speaking from experience, I did the ...
5
The biggest thing you need to weigh in on is,
Are you looking to advance the company
Are you looking to advance your career.
A lot of these answers are, do what's best for the company, not what's best for yourself. If you keep these tricks to yourself and it gains you 10,000 dollars in a salary bump for being the most productive dev in your company, or if ...
21
I would think twice before sharing.
For all you know, a lot of people are using these tricks.
Does your manager typically appreciate clever things?
Is your manager likely to share credit for your innovations with you?
A lot of the people on stackexchange work in places that do reward innovation, automation and teamwork, but not every workplace is like that....
104
I agree with almost all points given in Kate Gregory's answer but would suggest two minor changes:
First, I would not say "make me a lot faster than the rest of the team" (even in case it's true). I would go with "increase my productivity significantly".
Second, I am not the biggest fan of "lunch and learn" (even if it counts as worktime) because many ...
6
People will find out. And if a company needs to let go someone, it will be the ones who focussed on looking good at the expense of others and the company. So once your manager finds out, you're in trouble.
Best to publicly make the whole team more productive. But then you didn't mention in which country you work, so it might be different.
273
If you reveal it publicly (that is, everyone knows you have trained your peers) not only will you be more productive, but your whole team will be, and management will know why. By advancing the interests of the team and the company, you will be seen as someone making an important contribution. You're more likely to be promoted (for example, to team lead) or ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
